Section: The Atlantic (USA)
The Atlantic Politics Daily: ‘The Answer Is Yes.’
It’s Wednesday, November 20. In today’s newsletter: sorting through what Ambassador Gordon Sondland said. Plus, who will punch and who will be punched at tonight’s Democratic debates.*” TODAY IN POLITICS »(ANDREW HARNIK / AP)Ambassador Sondland didn’t disappoint, as a much-anticipated witness for the Democrats.1....
Why Career Diplomats Are Becoming Campaign Advisers
Battered by haphazard decisions and neglect, the State Department has seen a mass exodus of diplomats during the Trump administration. Now some former diplomats are so worried about what another Trump term would mean—further erosion of alliances, more loss of credibility with friends and foes alike—that they are for the first time taking their...
Devin Nunes Is Living in a Fantasyland
Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, opened today with a statement attacking media reporting on the Trump administration. He singled out six stories for attack.One of them was retracted by its publisher, CNN—a form of corporate responsibility never seen from a White House notorious for emitting six false statements...
What Gordon Sondland Does (And Doesn’t) Remember
Gordon Sondland this morning delivered the most damning congressional testimony against President Donald Trump since that of James Comey, the former FBI director whose firing led to a two-year investigation that consumed Trump’s presidency.But Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, is no Comey, whose seemingly...
Pompeo Was in the Loop
Mike Pompeo tried to stay out of it. He tried to block certain State Department officials from testifying in the House impeachment inquiry. He didn’t admit for days that he had listened in on the phone call at the heart of that inquiry, in which President Donald Trump asked Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a...
Gordon Sondland Is Aiming Right at Trump’s Achilles’ Heel
Nothing about Gordon Sondland’s handling of the Ukraine affair—either as the ambassador to the European Union or as a witness in the impeachment inquiry—has appeared methodical or subtle.But in his testimony today, Sondland seems to have found his sense of care. Systematically but consistently, he is undermining all of the pillars of...
The Two Most Important Sentences of the Impeachment Hearings
“Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret.”Those are the two most important sentences in today’s opening statement by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union. Sondland’s public testimony is the most hotly anticipated of the impeachment inquiry, and even before Sondland had uttered a word this morning, he’d...
The GOP’s Witnesses Aren’t Helping Trump
At the start of the second session of today’s doubleheader impeachment hearings, Chairman Adam Schiff noted an important distinction about the two witnesses appearing before the House Intelligence Committee: Both Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, and Timothy Morrison, a senior director on the National Security Council, were...
The Trump Presidency Is in Free Fall
That old sinking feeling is back.There have occasionally been stretches of time that are good for the Trump administration. There have more often been stretches that are bad, though there is a baseline of chaos that has come to feel almost normal. And occasionally, there have been truly hellacious stretches: May 2017, when Donald Trump fired...
President Trump Has Found His Plumbers
Last week’s Republican rallying cry on impeachment was “Hearsay!” By this morning, the focus had turned back to the whistle-blower who started it all.The consensus GOP retort to the first three public witnesses in the House impeachment inquiry—Ambassadors William Taylor and Marie Yovanovich, and George Kent, a deputy secretary of state—was...
